Song of the Day: Kingdom Crumbs – The Infinite

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part of our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJs think you should hear. This week, we’re featuring songs by artists performing at the 10th annual Decibel Festival. Today’s song is “The Infinite” by Kingdom Crumbs from the 2012 self-titled album on Cloud Nice.

Seattle band Kingdom Crumbs write ethereal, thoughtful songs. Floaty, but piercing, songs. Their aesthetic comes from hip-hop but it is hard – and unwarranted – to try and put the band in any genre box. Part of the Cloud Nice core, the four-piece hunkers down in the studio to write (they released their debut 13-track album in August 2012) and performs raucous live shows around the country (recently playing in Alaska!).

If their song “The Infinite” was a flower, it would be easy to assume that the bee that pollinated it had fluttered and touched the blooms of Prince’s musical production and Outkast’s spaced-out vocal style, watered then by rain falling from a Cloud Nice Cumulonimbus. The piece features a vocal line on repeat buoyed by “The Great Gig In The Sky”-esque background singing. Its individual parts are, in a way, simple, but their combination is complex and, even, comforting – like listening to the elements in a warm room behind a window pane.

Kingdom Crumbs played last night during the Sub Pop 25 showcase at Decibel Festival, withTHEESatisfaction, The Helio Sequence and Shabazz Palaces (sorry if you missed it!). No doubt they’ll be playing again soon in Seattle, so keep checking their website and Facebook page. Here they are performing live in the KEXP studio last year: